If one was becoming a physicist or a historian or a mathematician one would be entering a widespread collaboration and trained to understand certain achievements and perhaps to take them forward. Philosophy at first appears more patchy for it is not as if philosophers all agree. If one holds that there is a perennial philosophy moving through the Greeks, St Justin, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas to modern Thomists, then perhaps one would be surprised to find modern Thomists not agreeing. There was tremendous enthusiasm for Thomism in the 1930’s. After Vatican II it seems to have ebbed away. In 1879, Leo XIII’s encyclical, Aeterni Patris, promoting St Thomas Aquinas was a tremendous rallying cry. I do not have the impression of there being anything equivalent in the post Vatican II world. Perhaps though after Nazism and Communism it is rather a relief to be allowed to think ones own thoughts, even in the face of a mounting secular political correctness.
Fr Lonergan does not see metaphysics as a set of first principles which are evident and which provide a starting point for everyone. He sees metaphysics as an achievement, rather as modern science is an achievement or modern history is an achievement.
He sees the starting point for thought as a direct apprehension of what it is to be human, a phenomenology of our personal experience. Someone said that so and so had decided to accept the world and someone else said ‘gad she’d better’. I think it was Dr Johnson who proved that the world existed by banging the table. Lonergan gets us rather to describe dimensions of our human life and verify certain conclusions in the courtroom of personal experience. He calls this area of thought ‘cognitional theory’.
Our mental life, if we have reached any age is quite shaped up by our family, by what we were taught at school and what we have subsequently learned. No one entering this discourse is a ‘tabula rasa’. We have a language, familiarity with an occupation, papers we read; we have maybe one or two theories; we have maybe certitudes, a religion, duties and loves. One could say all this is purely subjective and that we need a clearer starting point. But Lonergan would claim there are elements of undeniable objectivity to our subjective experience and recognising the norms that bind us and direct us, and which have substantially done so over our lifetime will help us recognise our power to know what lies beyond us and so, in a way which will emerge, to achieve a metaphysic.
Lonergan in his work ‘Insight’ focuses on one aspect of what it is to be human, to have insights of various types. I think it is helpful to many to look at the whole gamut of human experience and to discover a certain objectivity which belongs to our case. We are used to finding a certain sort of objectivity in the already out there now real world making use of experiment, observation and mathematical structures; there is a certain objectivity about historical statements but our heuristic structure will need to be richer than what mathematics can supply if we are to deal with human motivation. Indeed it is likely that a better understanding of the conduct of others will flow from a better understanding of our own minds and hearts.
In physical science there is a flow of data and then a flow of mathematical notions to be verified or falsified by the data. So Newton’s F=MA startled the world with its accuracy and predictive power. So in history there is a flow of data and a hypothetical flow which hopefully is richer than just maths, so that certain positions can be verified, the power for example of the zeitgeist or the spirit of the age.
Our conscious living is similarly a flow and to come up with objective rules about the matter again is a matter of posing a theory and seeing whether or not it is verified. With empirical matters (and consciousness provides a flow of data) scientific status is achieved only by the methodical application of a heuristic structure. The simplest example might have to do with the fact that we all fall asleep and lose consciousness.
Consciousness then can have a zero condition, even though we exist, and are lying abed. One might ask can you prove that you are not conscious in another realm in another way when you are in a deep sleep, in the astral plane say, and the answer is I cannot prove or disprove it from the evidence available to me. I am seeking to account for the conscious flow which I experience.
When we are in the dream state we are not normally responsible for our conduct. It might happen that an angel comes to us and converses with us so that we are able to respond and agree responsibly as is reported to have happened to St Joseph. Presumably, from the standpoint of faith, something similar happens to us when we die. But this is not usually how we experience things. Our supernatural moments if they occur normally occur when we are fully awake. Philip the Chancellor’s distinction between nature and supernature comes to help us in cognitional analysis, the enquiry into the phenomenology of our ordinary consciousness, which phenomenology should include ordinary ways in which we experience the supernatural, if we do.
Ordinarily then the flow of consciousness moves from zero to dream consciousness, where we are not fully present to ourselves in the rich way that belongs to fully conscious experience. The dream of the morning may or may not be analysed as preparation for the day.
We awake into a world of sense experience and a question to be verified or denied is that when we wake into the world of sense experience we wake into the whole world we know. Maybe we wake gradually not sure of where we are, enjoying just animal experience. At some point, we come to into the whole world we know, with its routines, habits, duties, purposes, fears, hopes. We enter upon the stage of history refreshed perhaps by a good night’s sleep. Our world may be just a practical world or our spirit might rise immediately to God in some sort of prayer. Lives are very different. Some people dress with care, others just put on the clothes they threw on the floor the previous night. Conduct differs and underlying values may differ.
A proposition might be: when we apprehend a superior value in the conduct of another we may accept it or reject it. To accept a genuine value gives us the happiness of improving our lives, to reject it leads to rationalisation and a certain unease about our existence. For example, I was astonished to learn that Ghandi spent twenty minutes a day cleaning his teeth. He used to read at the same time. I have felt rebuked. My careless brushing over a life-time has led to countless visits to the dentist. Perhaps in India such visits would be harder and infections more frequent and dangerous. I don’t suppose I should rise to Ghandi’s high standard but I recognise scope for improvement in my life and am glad to do so.
It is the human embodiment of values that improves and challenges us. So we should all pray more, study more, brush our teeth more. Abstract utterances and pious platitudes go over our heads. But Alfred the Great actually attempted to spend one third of his time in prayer (else how should the country be blessed?), one third of his time in study (else how should he be a wise king?), and one third of his time in administration (else how should the Danes be repulsed?). A life well lived by another challenges us. The challenge can exist across time. We have an incipient point for an understanding of the communion of saints. Another proposition then to consider and verify: our understanding can develop, but normally only where there is some understanding to start with.
Friday 17 October 2008
Wednesday 1 October 2008
Personal Responsibility and Tradition
It is not without effort that we achieve something – we need the help and encouragement of others who have themselves been trained. We learn to drive from those who drive, but a more significant example comes from the Irish. The monks there spoke and wrote better Latin in 700AD than was found in Rome – the Irish, a people who had never even been part of the Roman Empire!
I recall at Oscott in the 1960s a sense of relief that we did not have to deal with Latin. Was not everything translated these days? I recall too a slight sense of surprise and disappointment about the matter. Was I witnessing a sort of decline? Or was it progress for I was training to be a priest in England in the late twentieth century? I would need to be in the same world as the people I was ministering to. The result though is I find myself dealing with a scriptural tradition with just a smattering of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. My Latin has gradually picked up a bit and a few Greek and Hebrew words somehow enter our contemporary Catholic culture. I am somehow aware my formation in the area of languages could be better.
It is worth recalling Lonergan’s words: ‘Excellence in any walk of life is ever a matter of effort, training, education, encouragement, support.’ (3rd Collection, p. 119) Encouragement and support normally come from the older generation though of course they might come as special grace from Heaven. One catches a glimpse here of the fact that teaching is a vocation not a job and that it is the sharing with another of a personal achievement. Where education is going on genuinely there is therefore a special union between teacher and pupil.
Lonergan sees the ground, the starting point of education as affectivity. I rather suspect that often the teacher approaches a difficult situation with a multitude in half rebellion with the idea he must show who is in control! Affectivity is the last thing one demonstrates in an age full of fear about child abuse. Affectivity when the world is starved of it is likely to be misinterpreted. There are those in psychological damage for whom affectivity leads to compulsive conduct. So perhaps the idea needs restoration. Surely it does!
First, parents and mothers particularly are supremely rich in affection to their children. I recall a religious sister, Mother Rosario, at the age of 80 kicking a football with some little children – she had obviously won their hearts. Our Lord, when he first deals with the fishermen invites them to ‘come and see’ where he lived. Did he who after his resurrection cooked them breakfast by the Sea of Galilee take them to some remote cell where he made them some mint tea? He was known as a glutton and a wine bibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners and about this wining and dining way of life he claims ‘wisdom is justified by her children’. When risen and dumbfounding, he asks for a bit of fish, I think we may envisage he was asking for a meal, and in the course of it he might have asked Peter how his mother’s health was. The art of winning affection and so setting a context for further things to go on would obviously be vital for those in communications, for example those who preach or teach. St Paul urges us to ‘let all people feel your warmth of heart’.
Lonergan has the realm of ‘values’ rising from the world of affection. So the Irish novices learned from older monks the value of Latin, and the children playing football with Sister Rosario picked up in a way the value of being a nun. I was blessing a couple of 3 year olds. One kept attending to her teddy bear. It was explained to me later that she was trying to get the bear to make the Sign of the Cross. She had picked up directly my concern to bless another.
I think we often think that values arise from abstract principles. Kant apparently disparaged emotions when it came to moral principles. There is a difference between those who think that abstract principles are self evident and those who argue that an abstraction flows from an insight, and an insight has emotion about it (Archimedes) as well as a schematic image of some sort.
Lonergan then has beliefs arising on values, including of course the value of believing other people who are creditworthy. Belief allows a division of labour with regard to knowing and so expands enormously the scale of what may be known, whether the matter is secular or religious. While Lonergan has beliefs arising from values one should note that one appropriates many values through belief. Knowledge comes at us in the form of propositions which may be true and certain or which may be opinions or which may be genuine fiction or even a lie, an attempt to deceive. May one see this general making use of belief to communicate all sorts of things as founding Cardinal Newman’s idea of notional assent? So many matters have to be known that not everything can be known with very great clarity and sureness.
It may be thought that what one wants to encourage is individual giftedness even unto genius and that the world of belief is somehow an impediment to this. One wants a historian with bright ideas, but to be a good historian does one not need to apply oneself to the relevant data? Perhaps some educational ideas today derive from the Enlightenment’s stress on Reason and its disparagement of Tradition. Once one realises that most knowledge is transmitted by belief one cannot avoid realising that a belief system is a tradition of some sort, and so even in scientific or historical matters, the Enlightenment position gets radically developed and genius becomes an infinite capacity for taking pains. So Newton thoroughly understood Galileo’s work on falling bodies and Clerk-Maxwell thoroughly understood Newton when he developed new equations to deal with the electro-magnetic world. You have a position achieved, a development, the transmission of a development (just 200 copies of Newton’s book were sold by1700) and new questions arising, because the development achieved does not answer everything.
Lonergan has understanding arising on the basis of belief. The teacher needs to understand if he is to achieve the transmission of some subject. Much of our knowing, based as it is on widespread belief, is notional. For teaching, though, insight is needed. It is worth noting that insight is into phantasm which has been formed into a schematic image which yields the appropriate understanding – which may then be expressed one way or another, in a simple way to children for example. A true insight can yield a general proposition for similars are similarly understood.
A teacher with insight not only successfully appropriates past achievement but is in a position to pass it on. Such ‘tradition’ goes on in many different areas, in Science, History, Philosophy, Theology and the practice of religion. Advance in one are can go with weakness in another. Bishop Grant used to say, ‘if we knew how to pass on our religion to the next generation, England would be Catholic by now’. A careerist culture is bad not only for religion – ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’ – but also for marriage and having children. I have spoken to women in their 40s who never noticed they were missing a family. A sheerly scientific emphasis informs technology wonderfully but focussing on the already out there now real fails to discern the human spirit in its curiosity as the prime mover. Historians may eliminate the finger of God. Perhaps this analysis shows up the importance of genuine love and genuine insights in the transmission of religious tradition. The philosopher can avoid entrapment in error and point up the polymorphic consciousness of man.
I recall at Oscott in the 1960s a sense of relief that we did not have to deal with Latin. Was not everything translated these days? I recall too a slight sense of surprise and disappointment about the matter. Was I witnessing a sort of decline? Or was it progress for I was training to be a priest in England in the late twentieth century? I would need to be in the same world as the people I was ministering to. The result though is I find myself dealing with a scriptural tradition with just a smattering of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. My Latin has gradually picked up a bit and a few Greek and Hebrew words somehow enter our contemporary Catholic culture. I am somehow aware my formation in the area of languages could be better.
It is worth recalling Lonergan’s words: ‘Excellence in any walk of life is ever a matter of effort, training, education, encouragement, support.’ (3rd Collection, p. 119) Encouragement and support normally come from the older generation though of course they might come as special grace from Heaven. One catches a glimpse here of the fact that teaching is a vocation not a job and that it is the sharing with another of a personal achievement. Where education is going on genuinely there is therefore a special union between teacher and pupil.
Lonergan sees the ground, the starting point of education as affectivity. I rather suspect that often the teacher approaches a difficult situation with a multitude in half rebellion with the idea he must show who is in control! Affectivity is the last thing one demonstrates in an age full of fear about child abuse. Affectivity when the world is starved of it is likely to be misinterpreted. There are those in psychological damage for whom affectivity leads to compulsive conduct. So perhaps the idea needs restoration. Surely it does!
First, parents and mothers particularly are supremely rich in affection to their children. I recall a religious sister, Mother Rosario, at the age of 80 kicking a football with some little children – she had obviously won their hearts. Our Lord, when he first deals with the fishermen invites them to ‘come and see’ where he lived. Did he who after his resurrection cooked them breakfast by the Sea of Galilee take them to some remote cell where he made them some mint tea? He was known as a glutton and a wine bibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners and about this wining and dining way of life he claims ‘wisdom is justified by her children’. When risen and dumbfounding, he asks for a bit of fish, I think we may envisage he was asking for a meal, and in the course of it he might have asked Peter how his mother’s health was. The art of winning affection and so setting a context for further things to go on would obviously be vital for those in communications, for example those who preach or teach. St Paul urges us to ‘let all people feel your warmth of heart’.
Lonergan has the realm of ‘values’ rising from the world of affection. So the Irish novices learned from older monks the value of Latin, and the children playing football with Sister Rosario picked up in a way the value of being a nun. I was blessing a couple of 3 year olds. One kept attending to her teddy bear. It was explained to me later that she was trying to get the bear to make the Sign of the Cross. She had picked up directly my concern to bless another.
I think we often think that values arise from abstract principles. Kant apparently disparaged emotions when it came to moral principles. There is a difference between those who think that abstract principles are self evident and those who argue that an abstraction flows from an insight, and an insight has emotion about it (Archimedes) as well as a schematic image of some sort.
Lonergan then has beliefs arising on values, including of course the value of believing other people who are creditworthy. Belief allows a division of labour with regard to knowing and so expands enormously the scale of what may be known, whether the matter is secular or religious. While Lonergan has beliefs arising from values one should note that one appropriates many values through belief. Knowledge comes at us in the form of propositions which may be true and certain or which may be opinions or which may be genuine fiction or even a lie, an attempt to deceive. May one see this general making use of belief to communicate all sorts of things as founding Cardinal Newman’s idea of notional assent? So many matters have to be known that not everything can be known with very great clarity and sureness.
It may be thought that what one wants to encourage is individual giftedness even unto genius and that the world of belief is somehow an impediment to this. One wants a historian with bright ideas, but to be a good historian does one not need to apply oneself to the relevant data? Perhaps some educational ideas today derive from the Enlightenment’s stress on Reason and its disparagement of Tradition. Once one realises that most knowledge is transmitted by belief one cannot avoid realising that a belief system is a tradition of some sort, and so even in scientific or historical matters, the Enlightenment position gets radically developed and genius becomes an infinite capacity for taking pains. So Newton thoroughly understood Galileo’s work on falling bodies and Clerk-Maxwell thoroughly understood Newton when he developed new equations to deal with the electro-magnetic world. You have a position achieved, a development, the transmission of a development (just 200 copies of Newton’s book were sold by1700) and new questions arising, because the development achieved does not answer everything.
Lonergan has understanding arising on the basis of belief. The teacher needs to understand if he is to achieve the transmission of some subject. Much of our knowing, based as it is on widespread belief, is notional. For teaching, though, insight is needed. It is worth noting that insight is into phantasm which has been formed into a schematic image which yields the appropriate understanding – which may then be expressed one way or another, in a simple way to children for example. A true insight can yield a general proposition for similars are similarly understood.
A teacher with insight not only successfully appropriates past achievement but is in a position to pass it on. Such ‘tradition’ goes on in many different areas, in Science, History, Philosophy, Theology and the practice of religion. Advance in one are can go with weakness in another. Bishop Grant used to say, ‘if we knew how to pass on our religion to the next generation, England would be Catholic by now’. A careerist culture is bad not only for religion – ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’ – but also for marriage and having children. I have spoken to women in their 40s who never noticed they were missing a family. A sheerly scientific emphasis informs technology wonderfully but focussing on the already out there now real fails to discern the human spirit in its curiosity as the prime mover. Historians may eliminate the finger of God. Perhaps this analysis shows up the importance of genuine love and genuine insights in the transmission of religious tradition. The philosopher can avoid entrapment in error and point up the polymorphic consciousness of man.
Circulation Analysis
Our philosophy group does not meet his week so I thought I would attempt an outline of Lonergan’s Circulation Analysis for those unable to plough through his two volumes. He refers somewhere to a pons asinorum, and this is it.
There is a moment when a study becomes a science. The details are left behind and some concise relation henceforth covers the details. For Theology it was Philip the Chancellor’s distinction between natural and supernatural (1230). For Physics it was Newton’s F=MA. For Chemistry it was Mendeleev’s Table. For Biology it appears to have been Darwin. For Psychology it may well be Fr Robert Doran’s work on the fruitful tension between psyche and intentionality. For Philosophy it is Lonergan’s making objective the dimensions of subjectivity. In Economics it is Lonergan’s claim that ‘the crossovers must equal’.
Lonergan reckons that his work makes Economics a science. He was a bellicose young man quite likely to bop you on the nose for no good reason if you lived in Buckingham, Canada before he joined the Jesuit novitiate. His Economics arose as an occupation during the war, 1943, 1944 holiday occupations. I think his Economics was his ‘war effort’, his contribution to the future. He would far have preferred to have been machine gunning his way round Monte Casino.
If he made Economics a science in the 1940’s, he did not stay with it. He got busy with Verbum, Insight, Method and his three collections. From the Third Collection we learn that in Economics, moral precepts should be technically specific. I suppose it is the genius of the Church to be technically specific in getting you to arrive at Mass on Sunday before the Gospel if you are to fulfil the Obligation. The Pons Asinorum has to set out the basic footfalls for getting to Heaven!
In 1943 Lonergan was 39, a mature man. He had passed through the Great Depression, aware of the misery it caused but also aware of false solutions, Socialism, Communism Nazism. A Major Douglas had arisen in Canada – his party still exists, no wonder – who proposed that the State should pay everyone for being a citizen. Lonergan’s father had been a hard working map maker. The idea of income for free was repellent to him. At the end of his Economics he laments that moneys meant to go for improving the lot of all should go on welfare. He is not soft.
In England a sort of genius John Maynard Keynes had arisen. In the seventeenth century his family had produced recusant priests. He was that paradox that can arise in England, an Etonian, a scholar, but of the professional classes. He was wonderfully free therefore, echoing in a way Bertrand Russell who was definitely upper crust and therefore free to be a conscientious objector in World War One. So Keynes wrote after Versailles on The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He was a great essayist. He wrote a book on probability which it was said only he understood and then only sometimes. Luminous with intelligence, he was concerned for the here and now – ‘In the long term we are all dead’ he wrote. Economics in Cambridge had been expounded by Alfred Marshall and then by Pigou who was concerned with welfare. I think one could say the Cambridge school was in favour of competition and reluctant to admit the State too much into economic affairs. The General Slump though led Keynes to write his General Theory in 1936. It advocated deficit spending to heal unemployment. Keynes went on to prove his competence by running the war at 3% and playing a part afterwards in the Marshall Plan and the World Bank. Keynes died in 1948 I think and has subsequently been accepted as the economic architect of our modern world.
In opposing Keynes, who was Lonergan? A scholastic type who had read Schumpeter on Trade Cycles and who played Bridge well. The fact that Lonergan was a scholastic helped him to identify the world of economics and produce a more subtle theory of things, so that, with understanding developing the economic world could retain its freedom. He saw Keynes as putting man’s freedom in the hands of ‘experts’.
He identifies the economic world as the world of money and markets where goods exchange for a price. The world of fruit gatherers was pre-economic and there might possibly be a post-economic world where gadgets which repair themselves meet all our needs. He identifies the end, the purpose of economic life as the sale of goods and services to the consumer. To explain the world of booms and slumps he has a joker in the pack, technical progress, which allows the amount of goods and services to increase and so, if all goes well, the standard of living to increase. He distinguishes long lasting assets like houses from goods currently produced. His analysis essentially deals with what is currently produced, including new houses sold this year.
The result of his analysis is that the boom happens because new equipment is being produced to raise the level of output. The whole economy is stretched and people are employed and prices are high. The slump time comes because the new capital gets in place and output can increase but at present prices, output cannot be afforded by many households. The paradox is that, if understood, the time of slump could be a time of unprecedented prosperity.
Lonergan has a technical expression to explain his key position, which is essentially very simple: ‘the crossovers must equal’. He means that households must be able to purchase the goods and services produced by firms and firms must be able to cover their costs paying wages and dividends to households. In our current situation the problem to be understood is not so much the sub-prime loan but the sub-prime household. The sub-prime household is buying things which are available on the market but at prices it cannot afford. There comes a point where the debt cannot be maintained.
In distinguishing the movement of goods and services as they are worked up from raw materials from the financial flows where ‘the crossovers must equal’, Lonergan has done for Economics what Hervey did for Biology when he identified the circulation of blood.
I have lived with Lonergan’s theory for 20 years now and so have answers for some things I do not think he addressed.
The question is where does the State fit in? I see the State as the household of households, and so essentially a purchaser of goods and services alongside other households. You might get a system where the State is in credit (through taxing the households) but the households are in debt. In fact the State gets in debt as do households but with this difference. The State bonds are sort of blue chip to the banking system allowing banks to increase the quantity of money. We find our post Keynesian world has been in constant inflation – a fact that would have made John Maynard Keynes turn in his grave.
The other question is, can the theory be understood by the ordinary man? Can one expect shops and firms to recognise the difference between boom and slump and to see that this is a time when prices need to be lowered? Instead of profit maximalisation one needs as it were a public sympathy for consumers, making everything reasonably possible for them rather than squeezing from them everything one can. For freedom to flourish in Lonergan’s world everyone must be able to understand the basic economic situation and act with concern for the common good as well as their personal good.
There is a moment when a study becomes a science. The details are left behind and some concise relation henceforth covers the details. For Theology it was Philip the Chancellor’s distinction between natural and supernatural (1230). For Physics it was Newton’s F=MA. For Chemistry it was Mendeleev’s Table. For Biology it appears to have been Darwin. For Psychology it may well be Fr Robert Doran’s work on the fruitful tension between psyche and intentionality. For Philosophy it is Lonergan’s making objective the dimensions of subjectivity. In Economics it is Lonergan’s claim that ‘the crossovers must equal’.
Lonergan reckons that his work makes Economics a science. He was a bellicose young man quite likely to bop you on the nose for no good reason if you lived in Buckingham, Canada before he joined the Jesuit novitiate. His Economics arose as an occupation during the war, 1943, 1944 holiday occupations. I think his Economics was his ‘war effort’, his contribution to the future. He would far have preferred to have been machine gunning his way round Monte Casino.
If he made Economics a science in the 1940’s, he did not stay with it. He got busy with Verbum, Insight, Method and his three collections. From the Third Collection we learn that in Economics, moral precepts should be technically specific. I suppose it is the genius of the Church to be technically specific in getting you to arrive at Mass on Sunday before the Gospel if you are to fulfil the Obligation. The Pons Asinorum has to set out the basic footfalls for getting to Heaven!
In 1943 Lonergan was 39, a mature man. He had passed through the Great Depression, aware of the misery it caused but also aware of false solutions, Socialism, Communism Nazism. A Major Douglas had arisen in Canada – his party still exists, no wonder – who proposed that the State should pay everyone for being a citizen. Lonergan’s father had been a hard working map maker. The idea of income for free was repellent to him. At the end of his Economics he laments that moneys meant to go for improving the lot of all should go on welfare. He is not soft.
In England a sort of genius John Maynard Keynes had arisen. In the seventeenth century his family had produced recusant priests. He was that paradox that can arise in England, an Etonian, a scholar, but of the professional classes. He was wonderfully free therefore, echoing in a way Bertrand Russell who was definitely upper crust and therefore free to be a conscientious objector in World War One. So Keynes wrote after Versailles on The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He was a great essayist. He wrote a book on probability which it was said only he understood and then only sometimes. Luminous with intelligence, he was concerned for the here and now – ‘In the long term we are all dead’ he wrote. Economics in Cambridge had been expounded by Alfred Marshall and then by Pigou who was concerned with welfare. I think one could say the Cambridge school was in favour of competition and reluctant to admit the State too much into economic affairs. The General Slump though led Keynes to write his General Theory in 1936. It advocated deficit spending to heal unemployment. Keynes went on to prove his competence by running the war at 3% and playing a part afterwards in the Marshall Plan and the World Bank. Keynes died in 1948 I think and has subsequently been accepted as the economic architect of our modern world.
In opposing Keynes, who was Lonergan? A scholastic type who had read Schumpeter on Trade Cycles and who played Bridge well. The fact that Lonergan was a scholastic helped him to identify the world of economics and produce a more subtle theory of things, so that, with understanding developing the economic world could retain its freedom. He saw Keynes as putting man’s freedom in the hands of ‘experts’.
He identifies the economic world as the world of money and markets where goods exchange for a price. The world of fruit gatherers was pre-economic and there might possibly be a post-economic world where gadgets which repair themselves meet all our needs. He identifies the end, the purpose of economic life as the sale of goods and services to the consumer. To explain the world of booms and slumps he has a joker in the pack, technical progress, which allows the amount of goods and services to increase and so, if all goes well, the standard of living to increase. He distinguishes long lasting assets like houses from goods currently produced. His analysis essentially deals with what is currently produced, including new houses sold this year.
The result of his analysis is that the boom happens because new equipment is being produced to raise the level of output. The whole economy is stretched and people are employed and prices are high. The slump time comes because the new capital gets in place and output can increase but at present prices, output cannot be afforded by many households. The paradox is that, if understood, the time of slump could be a time of unprecedented prosperity.
Lonergan has a technical expression to explain his key position, which is essentially very simple: ‘the crossovers must equal’. He means that households must be able to purchase the goods and services produced by firms and firms must be able to cover their costs paying wages and dividends to households. In our current situation the problem to be understood is not so much the sub-prime loan but the sub-prime household. The sub-prime household is buying things which are available on the market but at prices it cannot afford. There comes a point where the debt cannot be maintained.
In distinguishing the movement of goods and services as they are worked up from raw materials from the financial flows where ‘the crossovers must equal’, Lonergan has done for Economics what Hervey did for Biology when he identified the circulation of blood.
I have lived with Lonergan’s theory for 20 years now and so have answers for some things I do not think he addressed.
The question is where does the State fit in? I see the State as the household of households, and so essentially a purchaser of goods and services alongside other households. You might get a system where the State is in credit (through taxing the households) but the households are in debt. In fact the State gets in debt as do households but with this difference. The State bonds are sort of blue chip to the banking system allowing banks to increase the quantity of money. We find our post Keynesian world has been in constant inflation – a fact that would have made John Maynard Keynes turn in his grave.
The other question is, can the theory be understood by the ordinary man? Can one expect shops and firms to recognise the difference between boom and slump and to see that this is a time when prices need to be lowered? Instead of profit maximalisation one needs as it were a public sympathy for consumers, making everything reasonably possible for them rather than squeezing from them everything one can. For freedom to flourish in Lonergan’s world everyone must be able to understand the basic economic situation and act with concern for the common good as well as their personal good.
Personal Development
Undergirding our western world in its dynamism is the huge sacrifice and effort of countless monks for a thousand years after the time of St Benedict. Here was a way of life more than a profession: a vocation. At its heart was the gift of grace, the love of God poured into our hearts. The practical, the fraternal and the cultural achievement was immense. The life lived provided evangelisation in a vivid way for everyone. If the wayward ego was disciplined by denial and silence the self was set to grow serenely in the ways of faith, hope and love and, too, a practical prudence. St Anselm’s question, ‘Cur Deus Homo?’ flows from the highest truth and gave motion to the scholastic movement which methodically answered questions from the standpoint of faith. It has not been an achievement of modern man to place faith itself in question.
Transmitted from this epoch to the German people has been the word Bildung. It implies a direction for human development (Bild = image). It has to do with realising the image, for man is made in the image of God. Herder, much later, was to define Bildung as ‘reaching up to humanity’. In the late nineteenth century the notion of Bildung helped the German historians to gradually distance themselves from empirical science and from Hegelian philosophy and it gave them the confidence gradually to postulate the geisteswissenschaften alongside the naturwissenshaften.
It is worth noticing that Herder’s definition has lost the supernatural, whereby man is not only healed to attain the natural, but raised to be a son in the Son. So as this historical movement established itself, it set up a conflict with Revealed Religion and the Church, and so, around 1900, we had the modernist crisis.
In England we do not find the notion of Bildung. Shaftesbury translates it by ‘formation’, and in the nineteenth century the ideal would seem to be ‘the gentleman’. The idea of an individual in continual personal development seems to be lost.
Why should an idea filter through in Germanic but not in English culture? The origin in Germany of reformation culture was Luther, who won the support of small princes. In England Henry VIII shaped the State so that the State would shape the people from the beginning. Germany gradually made its way to an absolutist State in the mid-twentieth century. England had one from much earlier. In England movement was expected to be not so much personal as State led. When Kipling dreamed, his dream was ‘What of the Empire?’
The Church of course has the idea of a growth in holiness and the idea that grace builds on nature, but perhaps the nearest approach to bildung in the nineteenth century England is expressed by Newman’s ‘Idea of a University’. The idea is not to shape experts in this or that so much as people who are well formed in all that is going on so that passing through that environment you have, not the homo universale, but someone who can entertain ideas on all that is going forward. The humanist ideal of bildung is a sort of capacity to cope and not be fazed by anything.
Freud’s work on dreams began to be publicised in 1899. Geology and Biology in the mid nineteenth century had undermined the Bible as a literal text on how the world developed and so the context of Freud’s work, especially in areas where faith was based on ‘Scripture alone’ was one of increasing agnosticism and atheism. As with Marx, where the idea of something based apparently on Science won the total devotion of Marxists, so Freud hit the world as the originator not only of a new science but almost as the founder of a new atheist religion. Yet Freud’s study was not based on normal consciousness but neurotic consciousness. Educated consciousness had a new metaphysic, but with Adler and Jung the metaphysic changed. Then came Abraham Maslow who in the late twentieth century turned attention towards self actuating man, the dynamism of personality in movement. Bildung was movement towards humanity; originally it was movement towards divinity; but one gets the impression from Maslow that any consistent movement will do. Hitler or Robert Maxwell would qualify as self actuating.
Lonergan takes from the existentialists the word authentic. We don’t have to reach up to humanity for we are human and made in God’s image. But if we act in a sub human way we set up the unrest of a bad conscience in ourselves. We may experience moral impotence and so the need for a redeemer. The redemption may be socially mediated – so the crack-cocaine addict may need a team to help him – but ultimately it is a matter of a new heart, of God’s grace, a matter of the Purgative way, of overcoming sin in our lives. Two graces are involved here, Operative which changes the heart, and Cooperative which reaches through to new loving conduct. One learns to turn constantly to God for help.
Lonergan’s ‘Bildung’ then moves to the stage of Enlightenment. Overcoming all sins in the Purgative way, one faces the problem of tedium, of tepidity, of dropping away. Much lapsation begins this way, especially in our muddled modern culture where the Church appears as an optional extra. Here lies the importance of reaching through theory to the solidity of fact. Newman’s notional assent represents things not thought about, not concluded upon, bit somehow existing in the mental atmosphere. His real assent represents truths grasped as true with their reasons. Such truths give us Husserl’s ‘horizon’, Heiddeger’s ‘world’ and Lonergan’s virtually unconditioned, the enlightenment which is truth. An example might be Augustine’s battle with the Pelagians. The truth is we need God’s grace to be good, to be virtuous, to be authentic. We cannot just make our own way reliant upon our own natural virtue.
The unconditioned may be understood in terms of identity. The sensible in act is identical with the sense in act. The intelligible in act (in phantasm) is identical with understanding and also with its adequate expression in concept. When the evidence is in, the intelligible in act, the understanding of it, the expression of it corresponds with the real as it is. As with the branch giving first flower then fruit, so the movement to the truth is a subjective process full of maybes until the result is attained.
The self transcendence of knowing the truth (self transcendence since we know what lies beyond the self as simply experiencing) generates an horizon in which we may or must act. There is the norm of responsibility about how to live in the world we have come to know. We consider various courses of action, evaluate them, choose, persevere and perform. Through human action the world changes, demanding a new relationship and a new action.
The possibility of worthy action is normally conditioned by love, by divine grace moving man whether recognised or not. Love gives a new dimension of understanding and so a richer apprehension of choices, for example leading to a vocation.
Beyond enlightenment, there is union with God and with one another: the Unitive way. This leads to a new creation manifesting the fruits of the spirit, Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Fidelity, Gentleness and Self Control. Such is the direction of life to be found, Bildung restored to its Christian context.
Lonergan has three conversions which give direction and movement to life. He speaks laconically of religious conversion being God’s love poured into our hearts. He sees this love as grounding our faith, our loved assents, as we seek understanding of what is going on. He sees dogmas as acts of faith on the part of the Church when a crisis arises, save the Marian dogmas which expound our devotion.
The intellect is involved in an act of faith. Intellectual conversion is a becoming familiar with the different operations of intellect as we are familiar with using our eyes to see. This is not for everyone but is most helpful (essential?) to a theologian.
Moral conversion may be related to hope and hope for mankind. It is more than fulfilling the teleologies of nature for it means recognising what is happening and what needs doing, our historical conditionedness. Again a person may act well without too much theorising.
Fr Robert Doran SJ adds a further dimension of conversion. He is a major follower of Lonergan and adds in psychic conversion. Our psyche is shaped up, allowing and disallowing images and affects. So a young prince may easily imagine he is more important than a commoner and act accordingly. Lonergan quotes Freud, what the id is (the subconscious) the ego is to be (the person as manifold of demands). The id is not beyond our responsibility. So the monks we set off with would sing the Regina Caeli each night and so provide conscious and affective material to inform the id and thence the ego and thence the self. The broadening of the life of the id by deliberate efforts might help overcome shyness, exclusiveness, narcissism etc. etc. Contemporary Christian Bildung would involve religious, moral, intellectual and psychic conversion according to Fr Doran.
Transmitted from this epoch to the German people has been the word Bildung. It implies a direction for human development (Bild = image). It has to do with realising the image, for man is made in the image of God. Herder, much later, was to define Bildung as ‘reaching up to humanity’. In the late nineteenth century the notion of Bildung helped the German historians to gradually distance themselves from empirical science and from Hegelian philosophy and it gave them the confidence gradually to postulate the geisteswissenschaften alongside the naturwissenshaften.
It is worth noticing that Herder’s definition has lost the supernatural, whereby man is not only healed to attain the natural, but raised to be a son in the Son. So as this historical movement established itself, it set up a conflict with Revealed Religion and the Church, and so, around 1900, we had the modernist crisis.
In England we do not find the notion of Bildung. Shaftesbury translates it by ‘formation’, and in the nineteenth century the ideal would seem to be ‘the gentleman’. The idea of an individual in continual personal development seems to be lost.
Why should an idea filter through in Germanic but not in English culture? The origin in Germany of reformation culture was Luther, who won the support of small princes. In England Henry VIII shaped the State so that the State would shape the people from the beginning. Germany gradually made its way to an absolutist State in the mid-twentieth century. England had one from much earlier. In England movement was expected to be not so much personal as State led. When Kipling dreamed, his dream was ‘What of the Empire?’
The Church of course has the idea of a growth in holiness and the idea that grace builds on nature, but perhaps the nearest approach to bildung in the nineteenth century England is expressed by Newman’s ‘Idea of a University’. The idea is not to shape experts in this or that so much as people who are well formed in all that is going on so that passing through that environment you have, not the homo universale, but someone who can entertain ideas on all that is going forward. The humanist ideal of bildung is a sort of capacity to cope and not be fazed by anything.
Freud’s work on dreams began to be publicised in 1899. Geology and Biology in the mid nineteenth century had undermined the Bible as a literal text on how the world developed and so the context of Freud’s work, especially in areas where faith was based on ‘Scripture alone’ was one of increasing agnosticism and atheism. As with Marx, where the idea of something based apparently on Science won the total devotion of Marxists, so Freud hit the world as the originator not only of a new science but almost as the founder of a new atheist religion. Yet Freud’s study was not based on normal consciousness but neurotic consciousness. Educated consciousness had a new metaphysic, but with Adler and Jung the metaphysic changed. Then came Abraham Maslow who in the late twentieth century turned attention towards self actuating man, the dynamism of personality in movement. Bildung was movement towards humanity; originally it was movement towards divinity; but one gets the impression from Maslow that any consistent movement will do. Hitler or Robert Maxwell would qualify as self actuating.
Lonergan takes from the existentialists the word authentic. We don’t have to reach up to humanity for we are human and made in God’s image. But if we act in a sub human way we set up the unrest of a bad conscience in ourselves. We may experience moral impotence and so the need for a redeemer. The redemption may be socially mediated – so the crack-cocaine addict may need a team to help him – but ultimately it is a matter of a new heart, of God’s grace, a matter of the Purgative way, of overcoming sin in our lives. Two graces are involved here, Operative which changes the heart, and Cooperative which reaches through to new loving conduct. One learns to turn constantly to God for help.
Lonergan’s ‘Bildung’ then moves to the stage of Enlightenment. Overcoming all sins in the Purgative way, one faces the problem of tedium, of tepidity, of dropping away. Much lapsation begins this way, especially in our muddled modern culture where the Church appears as an optional extra. Here lies the importance of reaching through theory to the solidity of fact. Newman’s notional assent represents things not thought about, not concluded upon, bit somehow existing in the mental atmosphere. His real assent represents truths grasped as true with their reasons. Such truths give us Husserl’s ‘horizon’, Heiddeger’s ‘world’ and Lonergan’s virtually unconditioned, the enlightenment which is truth. An example might be Augustine’s battle with the Pelagians. The truth is we need God’s grace to be good, to be virtuous, to be authentic. We cannot just make our own way reliant upon our own natural virtue.
The unconditioned may be understood in terms of identity. The sensible in act is identical with the sense in act. The intelligible in act (in phantasm) is identical with understanding and also with its adequate expression in concept. When the evidence is in, the intelligible in act, the understanding of it, the expression of it corresponds with the real as it is. As with the branch giving first flower then fruit, so the movement to the truth is a subjective process full of maybes until the result is attained.
The self transcendence of knowing the truth (self transcendence since we know what lies beyond the self as simply experiencing) generates an horizon in which we may or must act. There is the norm of responsibility about how to live in the world we have come to know. We consider various courses of action, evaluate them, choose, persevere and perform. Through human action the world changes, demanding a new relationship and a new action.
The possibility of worthy action is normally conditioned by love, by divine grace moving man whether recognised or not. Love gives a new dimension of understanding and so a richer apprehension of choices, for example leading to a vocation.
Beyond enlightenment, there is union with God and with one another: the Unitive way. This leads to a new creation manifesting the fruits of the spirit, Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Fidelity, Gentleness and Self Control. Such is the direction of life to be found, Bildung restored to its Christian context.
Lonergan has three conversions which give direction and movement to life. He speaks laconically of religious conversion being God’s love poured into our hearts. He sees this love as grounding our faith, our loved assents, as we seek understanding of what is going on. He sees dogmas as acts of faith on the part of the Church when a crisis arises, save the Marian dogmas which expound our devotion.
The intellect is involved in an act of faith. Intellectual conversion is a becoming familiar with the different operations of intellect as we are familiar with using our eyes to see. This is not for everyone but is most helpful (essential?) to a theologian.
Moral conversion may be related to hope and hope for mankind. It is more than fulfilling the teleologies of nature for it means recognising what is happening and what needs doing, our historical conditionedness. Again a person may act well without too much theorising.
Fr Robert Doran SJ adds a further dimension of conversion. He is a major follower of Lonergan and adds in psychic conversion. Our psyche is shaped up, allowing and disallowing images and affects. So a young prince may easily imagine he is more important than a commoner and act accordingly. Lonergan quotes Freud, what the id is (the subconscious) the ego is to be (the person as manifold of demands). The id is not beyond our responsibility. So the monks we set off with would sing the Regina Caeli each night and so provide conscious and affective material to inform the id and thence the ego and thence the self. The broadening of the life of the id by deliberate efforts might help overcome shyness, exclusiveness, narcissism etc. etc. Contemporary Christian Bildung would involve religious, moral, intellectual and psychic conversion according to Fr Doran.
Towards Being Sensible
There is a strange way in which expertise becomes quite unhelpful if it sits in the saddle of practical judgement. Everything gets reduced to a theory which then gets applied. An example is perhaps the National Health Service which at the same time warns of the inevitability of a pandemic yet closes wards, or which was proposing to wait till both eyes were affected before treating a disease. The Russian bear has recently got prickly but NATO and the EC have been coming up to its back door perhaps following some impeccable logic of strategy. The United Nations plans to spend 45 Trillion (45 British GDPs) combating climate change. Local authorities in Great Britain propose vigilantes to deal with dog messes and rubbish bins. We witness a political class following political theories to solve practical problems, and losing common sense in the process.
It is somewhat surprising to learn that Aristotle thought moral judgement had a different basis from theory, so to know about morals one must study good men. Theoria was one thing; phronesis another. With our modern mind set we imagine it is perfectly OK for a politician to be hopeless in his personal morals so long as he is a good politician and does his job well. Good conduct, phronesis, depends on all the virtues being acquired, for Aristotle, for good practice depends upon dealing with everything. Plato sought a philosopher king. Aristotle thought a good king would need to know only so much about philosophy.
St Thomas Aquinas translates phronesis by ‘prudentia’ and man must combine worldly prudence with supernatural prudence. ‘Common sense’ is reduced to meaning a faculty which combines all the sense data into a grasp of the situation. If though one recalls that sense data can convey meaning St Thomas’ thought might support a richer understanding than at first appears. I have a sense that the Catholic moral tradition tends to inform prudence with certain conclusions: ‘thou shalt not . . .’, some based on natural law (contraception) some based on divinely revealed law (the indissolubility of marriage) but when it comes to how to be or what to do we have not theory but the example of Our Lord, Our Lady and the Saints. Our positive way forward is thus based very much on concrete examples.
Vico found himself dealing with the emergent mathematical certainty of the sciences and so emphasised probable arguments, images suitable for teaching the young, rhetoric and common sense. By ‘common sense’ he meant the virtue that makes community. Common sense led to knowledge as certain as the scientific axioms. It was a virtue formed by growing up in a people and valuing the traditions of public and social life. It has not been shown, one suspects, in the emasculation of the House of Lords from the time of Macmillan and in recent changes to the office of Lord Chancellor. Rather a political theory has come down from ‘above’.
In England ‘common sense’ became a remedy for the ‘moonsickness of metaphysics’ (which probably included Catholicism) but it was seen as a virtue, care for the common good and humour among friends (Shaftesbury). Hutchison, Hume, Reid – ‘The Rights of Man’ – and Adam Smith drew on the notion. The quest was for a moral philosophy that really does justice to the life of society. In this respect the movement was against metaphysics but also against scepticism.
In France the concept – le bon sens – was an uprightness of judgement which stemmed from right order in the soul. It is important to realise that the movement was against the inhuman consequences of a purely scientific attitude as well as an anti Catholic mentality building a post feudal world. The movement was on the side of the angels in that it was moralistic.
In Germany – not so politically developed – the notion was lost. Instead, with Kant, moral precepts arrived – never treat another person as a means – which lost the sense of ‘common sense’ or as we might put it today, a sense of ‘the common good’. There was though a pietist, Oetinger, who made use of the concept theologically, and interestingly identified common sense with the heart.
‘Common sense’ appears from time to time in political agendas. Perhaps the last time in England we experienced it was in the Second World War. Since then perhaps we have been spoken to by an increasingly expert political class. Alongside de facto top down power there is a presumed top down expertise. Who could object if in fact this were the case?
One of the motivations Lonergan had in working at Economics was to show what was wrong with Major Douglas (who thought every citizen should be paid a salary whether they worked or not) and to show what was wrong with John Maynard Keynes (who thought it belonged to experts and the government to achieve full employment). For Lonergan the world belonged to man and the world of economic progress lay in the free choices of consumers and producers. He aimed at a simple understanding of how the economy worked which would help everyone to play their part in freedom. He was thinking of a common sense of the good as well as personal self interest, but the common sense required a certain understanding.
One finds the experts incapable of understanding Lonergan’s thought, and so maybe the strategy should be to enlighten the multitude or maybe to enlighten neighbouring sciences. A great but painful cause of people thinking anew about macro-economics will be if our present recession proves to be a major slump – one cannot hope this will be the case because of the suffering involved and its relatively simple avoidability.
While Lonergan’s concern for Economics shows his ‘Common Sense’, ‘Le bon sens’, he actually uses the term common sense to describe the world we all enter when we leave the simple world of immediacy in the nursery and enter the world ‘mediated by meaning and motivated by value’, the world where words matter as much as things. That little verse is quite untrue ‘sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you’.
The values operative in this world may be mainly pleasure within the law or without it. The world of common sense does not mean ‘the sense of the common’ or ‘le bon sens’. He says somewhere ‘a good man is much less rare than a good people’. But ‘le bon sens’ is precisely a matter of operating and cooperating with others for the good which includes but goes beyond the personal good. As the Germans in the eighteenth century did not have the structure socially to take on board the idea, so it may be more dream than reality. We may touch it in a good cause, but it is about all good causes and a magnificent collaboration. Maybe ecclesiastical life is the last repository of ‘le bon sens’.
Lonergan who writes of three conversions, religious, moral and intellectual sometimes referred to religious conversion as affective conversion which has three dimensions, to God, to family and to mankind. One could there find le bon sens operating where religious conversion entails the love of mankind and practical policies to be adopted. Le Bon Sens involves immediate and world wide solidarity today.
In addition to common sense, Lonergan has several ‘differentiations of consciousness’ which may be attained, the scientific, the scholarly, the religious and the philosophic. As attained, these differentiations involve speculations but also judgements. Insights coalesce to form ones horizon. May one suggest that the word one hears moves one into the horizon one has attained? The dog hears the words ‘Come here’ and using ‘common sense’ obeys and moves. A man reads an article in the paper and the word read has to meld with the whole horizon attained, with its conversions and differentiations. Man full of sense is also full of intellectual attainment, which is activated by the word.
He responds to what he has read in an appropriate way, aware by common sense of who he is and who is listening and what the effect of his words is likely to be. The response made shows the depth of the human attainment. So Our Lord responds to the question about tax by calling for a coin, confirming that it has Caesar’s head on it, and saying ‘Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’. The answer that he gives opens one to his entire mind.
So by words man is immediately present to his entire achievement in the way of forming an horizon with its real assents in common sense and differentiated areas and affective conversions. There may be a pause as he gathers his being. This is Aquinas’ ‘Common Sense’ transformed into ‘le bon sens’. ‘Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks’. or as Gadamer puts it: ‘Cultivated consciousness goes beyond each of the natural senses . . . It is a universal sense.
It is somewhat surprising to learn that Aristotle thought moral judgement had a different basis from theory, so to know about morals one must study good men. Theoria was one thing; phronesis another. With our modern mind set we imagine it is perfectly OK for a politician to be hopeless in his personal morals so long as he is a good politician and does his job well. Good conduct, phronesis, depends on all the virtues being acquired, for Aristotle, for good practice depends upon dealing with everything. Plato sought a philosopher king. Aristotle thought a good king would need to know only so much about philosophy.
St Thomas Aquinas translates phronesis by ‘prudentia’ and man must combine worldly prudence with supernatural prudence. ‘Common sense’ is reduced to meaning a faculty which combines all the sense data into a grasp of the situation. If though one recalls that sense data can convey meaning St Thomas’ thought might support a richer understanding than at first appears. I have a sense that the Catholic moral tradition tends to inform prudence with certain conclusions: ‘thou shalt not . . .’, some based on natural law (contraception) some based on divinely revealed law (the indissolubility of marriage) but when it comes to how to be or what to do we have not theory but the example of Our Lord, Our Lady and the Saints. Our positive way forward is thus based very much on concrete examples.
Vico found himself dealing with the emergent mathematical certainty of the sciences and so emphasised probable arguments, images suitable for teaching the young, rhetoric and common sense. By ‘common sense’ he meant the virtue that makes community. Common sense led to knowledge as certain as the scientific axioms. It was a virtue formed by growing up in a people and valuing the traditions of public and social life. It has not been shown, one suspects, in the emasculation of the House of Lords from the time of Macmillan and in recent changes to the office of Lord Chancellor. Rather a political theory has come down from ‘above’.
In England ‘common sense’ became a remedy for the ‘moonsickness of metaphysics’ (which probably included Catholicism) but it was seen as a virtue, care for the common good and humour among friends (Shaftesbury). Hutchison, Hume, Reid – ‘The Rights of Man’ – and Adam Smith drew on the notion. The quest was for a moral philosophy that really does justice to the life of society. In this respect the movement was against metaphysics but also against scepticism.
In France the concept – le bon sens – was an uprightness of judgement which stemmed from right order in the soul. It is important to realise that the movement was against the inhuman consequences of a purely scientific attitude as well as an anti Catholic mentality building a post feudal world. The movement was on the side of the angels in that it was moralistic.
In Germany – not so politically developed – the notion was lost. Instead, with Kant, moral precepts arrived – never treat another person as a means – which lost the sense of ‘common sense’ or as we might put it today, a sense of ‘the common good’. There was though a pietist, Oetinger, who made use of the concept theologically, and interestingly identified common sense with the heart.
‘Common sense’ appears from time to time in political agendas. Perhaps the last time in England we experienced it was in the Second World War. Since then perhaps we have been spoken to by an increasingly expert political class. Alongside de facto top down power there is a presumed top down expertise. Who could object if in fact this were the case?
One of the motivations Lonergan had in working at Economics was to show what was wrong with Major Douglas (who thought every citizen should be paid a salary whether they worked or not) and to show what was wrong with John Maynard Keynes (who thought it belonged to experts and the government to achieve full employment). For Lonergan the world belonged to man and the world of economic progress lay in the free choices of consumers and producers. He aimed at a simple understanding of how the economy worked which would help everyone to play their part in freedom. He was thinking of a common sense of the good as well as personal self interest, but the common sense required a certain understanding.
One finds the experts incapable of understanding Lonergan’s thought, and so maybe the strategy should be to enlighten the multitude or maybe to enlighten neighbouring sciences. A great but painful cause of people thinking anew about macro-economics will be if our present recession proves to be a major slump – one cannot hope this will be the case because of the suffering involved and its relatively simple avoidability.
While Lonergan’s concern for Economics shows his ‘Common Sense’, ‘Le bon sens’, he actually uses the term common sense to describe the world we all enter when we leave the simple world of immediacy in the nursery and enter the world ‘mediated by meaning and motivated by value’, the world where words matter as much as things. That little verse is quite untrue ‘sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you’.
The values operative in this world may be mainly pleasure within the law or without it. The world of common sense does not mean ‘the sense of the common’ or ‘le bon sens’. He says somewhere ‘a good man is much less rare than a good people’. But ‘le bon sens’ is precisely a matter of operating and cooperating with others for the good which includes but goes beyond the personal good. As the Germans in the eighteenth century did not have the structure socially to take on board the idea, so it may be more dream than reality. We may touch it in a good cause, but it is about all good causes and a magnificent collaboration. Maybe ecclesiastical life is the last repository of ‘le bon sens’.
Lonergan who writes of three conversions, religious, moral and intellectual sometimes referred to religious conversion as affective conversion which has three dimensions, to God, to family and to mankind. One could there find le bon sens operating where religious conversion entails the love of mankind and practical policies to be adopted. Le Bon Sens involves immediate and world wide solidarity today.
In addition to common sense, Lonergan has several ‘differentiations of consciousness’ which may be attained, the scientific, the scholarly, the religious and the philosophic. As attained, these differentiations involve speculations but also judgements. Insights coalesce to form ones horizon. May one suggest that the word one hears moves one into the horizon one has attained? The dog hears the words ‘Come here’ and using ‘common sense’ obeys and moves. A man reads an article in the paper and the word read has to meld with the whole horizon attained, with its conversions and differentiations. Man full of sense is also full of intellectual attainment, which is activated by the word.
He responds to what he has read in an appropriate way, aware by common sense of who he is and who is listening and what the effect of his words is likely to be. The response made shows the depth of the human attainment. So Our Lord responds to the question about tax by calling for a coin, confirming that it has Caesar’s head on it, and saying ‘Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’. The answer that he gives opens one to his entire mind.
So by words man is immediately present to his entire achievement in the way of forming an horizon with its real assents in common sense and differentiated areas and affective conversions. There may be a pause as he gathers his being. This is Aquinas’ ‘Common Sense’ transformed into ‘le bon sens’. ‘Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks’. or as Gadamer puts it: ‘Cultivated consciousness goes beyond each of the natural senses . . . It is a universal sense.
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